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Cowbirds in Illinois that sneak their eggs into other birds' nests retaliate violently if their scam gets foiled, researchers say.

The brown-headed cowbirds of North America outsource nest building and chick raising. Female cowbirds dart into other birds' nests, quickly lay eggs, and rush away. The nest owners are left to care for big, demanding cowbird chicks.

Most tea drinkers don't give much thought to how tea leaves are processed prior to arriving in a tin or tea bag. However, a Korean team of food scientists has. Realizing that many people are trying to consume more of certain tea-derived antioxidants—especially compounds called catechins—the researchers wondered whether concentrations of those chemicals might be affected by tea-leaf handling....

Researchers cruising the South Pacific between Tonga and Fiji study huge snails that, aided by an abundance of bacteria housed in their gills, feed off plumes of metal-rich compounds at active hydrothermal vents. Scientists working off the California coast use chemical-sniffing probes, robotically driven subs, and seafloor-tethered temperature sensors to watch flows of lava pave over a once-...

People who have a hard time waking in the morning because their bodies' internal clocks are out of sync with their sleep schedules are said to have "social jet lag." Researchers in Europe have determined that the phenomenon strongly correlates with smoking.

Battling one's biological clock can leave people weary in the same way as...

Scientists have long known that Albert Einstein skipped something a century ago when he analyzed Brownian motion—the jiggling of particles in a fluid, such as pollen in water. Now, researchers using measurements of unprecedented precision have observed the discrepancy between Einstein's model and a single particle's path.

As a consultant to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Jill Robinson walked onto her first bear farm 12 years ago. At this facility in southern China, she found each bear standing not on a solid floor but on bars in a cage too small for the animal to take even one step. Although the Asiatic black bear is normally a solitary and clean animal, these cages were crowded together in...

A newly created form of carbon has captured the crown of world's strongest known material. A team of researchers in Germany and France made the new material using a specialized, multijawed anvil that simultaneously squeezed and heated a powder of all-carbon molecules known as buckyballs.

At 200,000 times atmospheric pressure and a temperature of 2,500 kelvins, the powder...

The Food and Drug Administration is about to prohibit poultry farmers from treating chickens and turkeys with the antibiotic enrofloxacin. Use of the antibiotic, whose trade name is Baytril, is leading to the emergence of microbes in the birds' meat that resist several antibiotics used to treat food poisoning in people, the agency says.